PayPal Says It's Not Ripping, Replacing VMware For OpenStack

PayPal says it has no intention of replacing its VMware software with OpenStack, despite recent reports suggesting it and parent company eBay are looking to switch their servers to open source software.

In a Wednesday blog post, Bogomil Balkansky, senior vice president of cloud infrastructure at VMware, essentially said there's nothing to see here, folks.

"Our relationship with eBay and PayPal is a partnership we're proud of, and a great example of the role VMware plays in both typical customer environments and in a bleeding-edge cloud development initiative," Balkansky said in the blog post.

PayPal is committed to supporting multiple cloud environments and has no intention of getting rid of VMware software, according to Nat Rajesh Natarajan, PayPal's vice president of platform engineering operations, who is quoted in Balkansky's post -- with PayPal's permission.

"We’re not interested in a 'rip and replace' approach. In fact, this collaboration will help us utilize robust virtualization technologies such as VMware," Natarajan is quoted as saying in the blog post. "They are a valued PayPal partner, and we intend to continue leveraging their core strengths in our cutting edge cloud environment."

PayPal hasn't yet addressed the issue on its own website, and its spokespeople didn't respond to CRN's request for additional clarity on Natarajan's comments.

On Monday, Boris Renski, co-founder and executive vice president of OpenStack systems integrator Mirantis, told Business Insider his company is working with PayPal and eBay on a project that could ultimately lead to them replacing VMware with OpenStack on some 80,000 servers.

Renski said PayPal is planning to replace VMware with OpenStack on 10,000 of its servers this summer, but he didn’t indicate whether eBay and PayPal are ditching VMware's hypervisor. OpenStack, a set of cloud infrastructure-as-a-service tools, doesn't have its own hypervisor, and it works with VMware's vSphere, as well as Xen, Hyper-V and KVM, among others.

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